As e-commerce continues to grow and expand, people prefer to tailor the tangible or intangible product to their needs and/or preferences. In this regard, most retailers and service providers allow people to configure products according to these attributes. However, to offer a variety of products with configurable or selectable attributes, an online merchant or service provider may maintain a database of attributes and products. However, as the number of offered products and selectable attributes increases, the amount of effort to manage and process product requests also increases, sometimes exponentially. As the effort required on the merchant side increases, the amount of time spent waiting to view a configured product also increases. Hence, current product configuration systems are insufficient for complex configurable products because of their inability to scale with increases to inventory or changes in the number of attributes for configuring a product.
Moreover, certain configurable products may have features that are only applicable to certain channels of commerce (e.g., in-person with an agent, via the internet, over the phone, etc.), to certain jurisdictions, or certain companies, or for a certain period, etc. For example, in the context of insurance policies, certain features may only be available to a certain date. In another example, when configuring a bike, disc brakes may only be available on certain models or up to a certain date. In this regard, as the number of features increase, there is greater difficulty in managing the versions and availability of features. Thus, current complex product configuration systems lack the ability to manage versions in a fast and secure manner.
Additionally, in financial services industries, such as insurance, where product options and features change based on jurisdiction, managing variations of products and their versions increases the complexity of the solutions. In this regard, current products available are inadequate for managing the complexity of production variations and their versions.